noise

Do you ever lie in bed at night, the house is quiet, someone is sleeping nearby, the sound of their breathing steady and rhythmic, and that is when the words, the ideas, the sentences form in your mind, easily, naturally, like icy tendrils snaking across the surface of a puddle as temperatures drop below freezing?

Inevitable.

Beautiful.

You want nothing more than to write them down, capture them like butterflies in a net, but turning on a light and searching for your pen and paper would disrupt your partner, and every noise and movement feel like an earthquake. So you roll over and curl up into a ball, file away the thoughts and hope that sleep doesn’t erase them.

Unfortunately it almost always does as the sweet emptiness of the quiet night where you can hear your thoughts, the synapses of ideas clicking together like building blocks, gives way to the chaos of day, where the constant bombardment of noise, and other people’s ideas create such a cacophony of sheer absurdity that you no longer hear the click of your own building blocks coming together and the words that came so easily in the quiet of the night are like lost souls by the light of the day, gone, never to return, at least not in any recognizable way.

And so the pattern repeats itself, day after noisy day, followed by the blissful quietude of night when you are supposed to be asleep but instead your brain feels more awake than at any other time of the day and is liberated from the absorption of noise, freeing up neurons and electrons to create, to procreate and to recreate the very ideas that drive us to love, to connect, maybe even to change the world.